Common sense is scattered to the winds when it comes to our country getting in the carbon control business. Al Gore is a much bigger scam artist than Bernie Madoff ever was.
Let’s try common sense. If you feel global warming is a big issue and you want to help reduce CO-2 emissions in the U.S., it will cost you about $500 for 5 tons of forgiveness. For a family of 4, that’s $2,000 a year. That money will go from your broker to someone, somewhere in the world, who claims they are reducing something, like methane from pigs. But, to make a big difference, or to go from making you neutral to a reduction, you need to offset what someone else is doing somewhere else in the world. The other 80% of humanity that is poor can’t be kept from improving their lifestyle because we ask. China is adding 100 gigawatts of coal-fired electrical capacity a year. That’s another whole United States’ worth of coal added ever three years. Other poor countries are on the same track.
Asking these countries to sacrifice won’t work. How well have we done with stopping the Afghani’s from growing poppies? Marijuana is the number one cash crop in the United States. Countries that have coal and need power are going to mine it and build it. They want 3 cent coal vs. 15 cent wind or 30 cent solar. Only the rich can afford wind or solar and these countries aren’t rich. Can we afford those costs? To try to unilaterly save the world?
To generate 2 to 3 megawatts of power you would need a 50 story windmill. A jet needs 100 megawatts to get off the ground. Meeting New York’s energy demand will require 13,000 windmills at top speed. Since they never achieve top speed, you would need 50,000.
The greens stopped the nuclear industry years ago. That has added 400 million tons of coal being burned each year. This is the difference between the planned nuclear plants and their production and the amount of that gap which was filled by coal fired plants.
Going to hybrid cars which run on electricity will increase power demand. The three options to meet that demand are coal, natural gas, and oil. It will present a disposal problem with batteries.
We make big decisions in the environmental arena without debate and due diligence to the offsets. Shutting down nuclear was the worst. The worst yet.
We may be embarking on one that will dwarf that decision.
Spending billions, taxing citizens with cap and trade, and creating problems that the marketplace can’t solve, may doom our economy.
The upshot may be one of three things. One, global warming may have been bad science and all efforts were wasted. Two, global warming may have been a real problem, but all efforts by wealthy countries were offset tenfold by poor countries and now the poor countries are rich and the rich countries poor. Three, global warming was a real problem, but the solution was to work on the areas that offset the problem, not create the problem. Like planting more trees.
